Abstract in another language

Business process management has established as a suitable means to document and analyze enterprise value chains as well as to repeat them in a steady or improved quality. For that purpose, a variety of often highly diverse process modeling languages is available. This suggests at least two sorts of conclusions: On the one hand none of the languages is accepted as the "ne-plus-ultra"-standard and, on the other hand, this often leads to language barriers. In general, we distinguish between imperative and declarative process modeling languages. Imperative languages describe valid process execution paths explicitly while models conforming to a declarative language implicitly permits those execution paths that do not violate any of the modeled rules. Irrespective of this classification the languages differ in terms of their capability to consider the process from different perspectives. In certain situations, the variety and diversity of process modeling languages has an adverse effect on the usefulness of process models. This refers to, for instance, the intelligibility of a model in the case that the user is unfamiliar with the modeling language, its interoperability with "foreign-language" process execution systems, the related backward compatibility in the case of language evolution as well as its comparability with models conforming to other languages.
This thesis mainly focuses on the conceptual development of approaches that mitigate the difficulties caused by the diversity of process modeling languages. In future these approaches can improve the acceptance of individual languages and their combinations. The first approach is a simulator for multi-perspective declarative process models that is able to generate artificial logs of valid and invalid process execution paths. These logs can be utilized to improve both the comprehension of a process model and its comparability with a second model. The second approach, a generator for process descriptions in natural language based on multi-perspective declarative process models, removes formal-language barriers and, therefore, produces the same effect. The third approach is a generic translator for process models and, hence, can establish the compatibility between a process model and language-specific process execution systems. Since migration is a special form of translation the same tool can be used to bridge gaps between language versions.
Comparable simulation approaches exclusively operate either on imperative or on mono-perspective declarative process models and are usually unable to generate examples for invalid process execution paths. Translators for process models are rare and mostly language-specific. In the context of business process management, research regarding the generation of natural language texts focuses on imperative process modeling languages. The functionality, feasibility and usefulness of the approaches are evaluated by their application to various exemplary models and through a qualitative survey.